Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England

Traces the influence of early modern theology, particularly Protestant theology, on cultural understandings of and reactions to sensory disability in the period

• Provides context for the modern-day exclusionary treatment of disabled persons in politics, education, and society by identifying the Protestant Reformation’s impact on contemporary perspectives of disability
• Contributes to the developing field of early modern disability studies in its original proposal for a new epistemological model and in its focused analysis of early modern depictions of deafness and blindness
• Extends its analysis beyond the early modern canon in a comprehensive survey of cultural artifacts, including dramatic texts, poetry, prose, theological tracts, and pedagogical treatises
• Tackles the question of the Reformation’s impact on representations of disability and introduces new texts to the disability studies canon

Chronicling England’s infamous rejection of an established faith tradition – the Protestant Reformation – and its reverberating effects on societal interpretations of sensory disability, Mary Lutze offers a new epistemology for understanding early modern perspectives of the disabled. In addition to illuminating the historical treatment of disabled bodies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Lutze’s study clarifies an origin for the inherited stigma towards nonnormative bodies today. In its introduction of the early modern religious model of disabilities and the application of that model on a catalogue of early modern cultural artifacts, Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England provides a new dialectic by which disability studies and early modern scholars may approach and understand the dramatic and nondramatic texts of the period.